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Is a Sense of Being Trapped in the “Wrong” Body Always a Delusion?
It came as a surprise to me to hear that Camille Paglia calls herself transgender, and more surprising that Ricochetti might be OK with it – more specifically, that there might be those who are OK with it when Paglia does it but not OK with it when others do it. It’s possible that what makes it OK for Paglia is that she’s not “gender dysphoric” – “She fully embraces her identity, both physical and mental,” and is “self-confident and passionate” about it, as @cm put it. This piques my interest, I admit, and in a way that goes beyond the merely academic.
If “gender dysphoria” is taken to mean “unease with the sex you were born into,” well, then I have a fair amount of experience being gender dysphoric. In my case, there now seems to be a reasonable explanation for it: a congenital defect whose severity would be considerably mitigated if I were born male – moreover a defect not identified until this year, so that I’ve spent most of post-pubescent life sensing (correctly, it turns out) that my body was somehow wrong and that being born female heightened this wrongness, while also having no socially-acceptable reason to give others for why I sensed this.
Had my 16-year-old self taken this quiz, for example, it would have told her “you have signs of Gender Dysphoria” and advised her to consult a professional. I imagine the prospect of an impressionable teen running across such a quiz and believing it is a frightening one for parents, especially conservative parents. Especially since “gender dysphoria” doesn’t just mean unhappiness with being the sex you were born into, but has been conflated with the positive desire to transition to the other sex:
I suppose most of us suppose that most youths can’t escape adolescence without having felt at least a little unease about their sex characteristics. Especially girls – there’s a reason the English-speaking world nicknamed the curse “the curse.” Yet when you look up “gender dysphoria” on Wikipedia, you read that people who have it aren’t just unhappy, they’re transgender.
Conservatives are quite reasonably suspicious of such a designation. How can it be that everyone who has been unhappy – even deeply unhappy – with the sex characteristics they were born into could be transgender? Of course it can’t be so. Indeed, the prospect is so absurd that it’s no wonder that some conservatives have become quite wary of profound unhappiness with this aspect of bodily life. A dissatisfaction that goes deep enough that ridding yourself of your genitals and sex hormones begins to sound appealing? Why, that must be delusional!
It’s not necessarily, though. And if we wish to get youths to listen to us when we try to talk them out of regrettable attempts to sexually re-engineer their still-growing bodies, we should be honest that unhappiness over sex characteristics so deep that ordinary people have difficulty relating to it, or even accepting it, does exist, and can have biological causes. It did in my case.
Even at 16 (well, before 16), I was a curmudgeon. So I doubt my teenage self would have heeded advice to “seek professional help” about being “gender dysphoric,” much less that I could have been persuaded to transition, rather than just joke about transitioning. But joke I did (perhaps I was unintentionally ahead of my time in edgy humor here), and of course the joke was straight gallows humor – about as funny as a heart attack.
Knowing how seriously I was joking, I can quite easily picture the risk that pressure to transition puts on youths who might otherwise grow out of their misery, or who might at least find some way of coping with it in the body they were born into. But I also know the pressure people face to dismiss what’s really happening to them and to their bodies as “delusions” just because it doesn’t fit in with people’s expectations.
After all, I had my young self convinced for quite a while that I was “delusional” for experiencing my body as my body really was. I was prepared to believe misery of the body was “merely” a manifestation of some misery of the soul. In my more hopeful moments, I could think of the misery as atonement for my sins – if not for sins of commission (of which, looking back, it seems I had fewer of than the typical teenager), then for sins of omission: I didn’t/wasn’t ________ enough, and so I deserved what I got. Perhaps it sounds strange to label self-accusing “I deserve this” moments hopeful, but consider the alternative: if the misery wasn’t atonement, what meaning did it have?
For this and other reasons, perhaps, I found in my youth that church – even the mainline, politically liberal church I attended – gave my life a structure my natural family couldn’t. Natural family (even an exemplary natural family) may fail as an organizing principle for someone whose only experience of the “gift” of sexual maturity is as a “curse.” The church family, fortunately, is not a natural family. You’re not born into it, but adopted; you don’t add to it through your physical fertility, but through other means.
Many with stigmatized sexual and gender orientations speak of finding a community not based on the natural family that “adopts” them into its “family” when they find themselves unable to relate to their natural family. For me, that community was church, not so much church as a social outlet, but as a liturgical bond. (Having recently heard that transgender economist Deirdre McCloskey is also a Christian leaves me wishing I could ask her if church served as a similar sort of adoptive family for her.) Just knowing, for example, that the William Cowper who wrote so many of the hymns in my church hymnal was the same William Cowper who wrote the poem “Hatred and vengeance,—my eternal portion” helped church feel like home to me in a way the family home couldn’t. In church, I could hope that, even if “Hell keeps her ever-hungry mouths all / Bolted against me,” maybe God wouldn’t.
Of course, it’s widely supposed that Cowper himself was no more than delusional when he wrote that bit of verse. But I know now that I was not. Moreover, I now know that trying to explain away my discomfort in my own skin as mere “delusion” was not just unrealistic and unjust, but ultimately destructive. The meaning I got from continually hoping the misery was no more than some subconsciously self-inflicted (and well-earned) penance came at a steep cost. Losing that meaning is saddening, actually – I still miss it – but for me, the real delusion would be believing that what I felt obligated to dismiss as mere delusion was merely delusion when it wasn’t.
For that reason, I’m hesitant to dismiss others whose struggles with their body, though quite different from my own, still strike an unsettlingly familiar chord with me. It’s possible to avoid dismissing a sense of mismatch between the soul and the body’s sex characteristics as “delusional” while also urging youngsters who sense such a mismatch to wait and see if they can make peace with the body they were born with rather than re-engineering it at a tender age.
Published in General
I don’t think in terms of masculine and feminine, and I think that’s also where our society is heading, if science fiction is to be viewed as predictive of the future. Unisex is the way ahead. I think people who are looking at gender confusion are focusing way more attention on it than is warranted given the open and free society we have fortunately become. People can be and do anything they want to today. If they are being criticized as being not feminine or masculine enough, I’d be looking for emotional abusers in their life. It is far more likely that they are being or have been abused emotionally than that there is anything to their fears of not being masculine or feminine enough to suit society. I say that because they are approaching psychiatrists to “fix” them somehow, to help them forge a unified identity when a unified identity isn’t needed in order to be successful and happy.
Maybe we are looking at this the wrong way. Maybe it is just a rare emotional intelligence gift born in the part of the brain responsible for empathy. It is the same gift that has allowed writers like Henrik Ibsen to create credible characters of the opposite sex.
I think we’re probably in agreement a fair bit on this subject, but there are a few points I’d like to push back on. First, the “two bin model”. Sex is not a complex spectrum or a normal distribution. The number of people who are truly intersex (xxy chromosomes or a mix of both xx and xy) is really, really small compared to the population as a whole. The number increases somewhat when other conditions, such as what @midge has alluded to, are considered, but even then it’s just not that many people. If I’m doing data analysis on a set of numbers with this kind of distribution, a two bin model will work just fine. (This does not mean I think the people who don’t fit neatly into one bucket or the other can be ignored or dismissed out of hand. Treat people as individuals, like I said earlier.)
As far as denying “the reality of their brains” goes, that’s what I see as the important part of the original post. There is a distinction between people who are uncomfortable with their gender or don’t feel like they fit into the normal gender roles but don’t deny that they have a specific biological sex and people who insist that the “reality of their brain” trumps all other reality. We need to be considerate of the difference and not assume that it’s all the same thing.
I know this probably seems like a small technicality, but there are intersex people whose sex-chromosome count is normal (either XX or XY). Apparently the most common intersex condition involves a normal chromosome count, that is, being XX but genitally masculinized, while being XY but phenotypically feminine is also fairly common – well, common as these things go. A woman with Swyer Syndrome, for example, is XY but lacks functioning ovaries. Such a woman can, with therapy, carry a baby to term, although the embryo has to be implanted, since obviously she has no eggs of her own.
None of this is to portray being intersex as more common than it really is, only to show that being intersex is a lot weirder than popular wisdom often supposes – being “truly intersex” is not just about ambiguous chromosome count. A lot has to go right for two X chromosomes to produce a fully female phenotype and for an X and Y chromosome to produce a fully male phenotype, so it’s really rather amazing it goes right as often as it does, which is the overwhelming majority of the time.
I have never noticed that. Especially drag queens, they tend to be the most socially out going and witty people I have ever meet.
Maybe I should have said people need to start thinking about gender as separate from (even if highly correlated with) sex. That complicates things and most people prefer simple models to complex models so I understand the resistance to something other than the sex=gender model, but nonetheless…
I wouldn’t see it as “trumps” so much as “equivalent to” in terms of levels of truth. It does trump other things in the sense that you should treat them by their perceived brain state rather than by their genitals, if for no other reason than: when conversing, we’re engaging with their brains rather than their chromosomes, so what their brain thinks/feels becomes almost exclusively relevant.
The Link Between Autism and Trans Identity
Yep.
I don’t do the pantomime well; it just doesn’t really work, and I am downright terrible at faking a lot of things. It’s a lot of work to order my life so that it is a non-issue (most of my friends are men; I usually work very well with male colleagues or women who are more “tomboys” of sorts; I am conveniently busy but send nice presents for girl rituals like bridal showers).
As a conservative, I think it’s good for women to have some “male” skills. (If you are going to complain about the wage gap, please at least have made a passing attempt at having a career in finance, medicine, petroleum engineering, etc. Please do not complain about how useless men are and not be able to change a lightbulb or your own oil. I like the Second Amendment and have noticed how people, especially women, who get trained to handle firearms find them a lot less scary and in need of being banned than their counterparts do.)
So I worry that this focus on “traditional gender roles” will put women in a double bind: incapable of caring for ourselves, but shamed if they ask the government to do it.
That is, of course, the utilitarian argument for not getting too hung up on gender roles.
Drag queens aren’t transexuals, they are drag queens, which is a whole ‘nother thing (though they can also be transsexuals, I suppose). And it’s not like people with high-functioning autism are unused to acting.
That’s absolutely correct. I meant to include that after “a mix of xx and xy” but forgot to get back to it. In any case, you did a much better job of explaining it. Most of those conditions seem to be related to the level of hormones present during fetal development. It appears to be a huge factor when it’s not consistent with the chromosomes, which is fortunately a rare occurrence.
I don’t have time to look for it right now (gotta go celebrate a birthday), but there’s a really good essay somewhere out there that addresses this (gender and sex) in terms of language and how changing what words mean can be problematic. If I can find it I’ll post a link.
Right. So to the degree to which conservatism relies on innate/ physically derived aspects of gender performance to describe model gender roles (i.e. if the argument is that women are naturally possessed of particular urges and tendencies, those urges and tendancies being products of a particular hormone mix), conservatism is taking the trans side of the debate. On the flip side, liberals who take the trans side of the debate find themselves arguing against the lack of physically derived gender roles, a core and destructive leftist tenet for all of our lifetimes.
When you say “full”, what you’re talking about really is on a spectrum. Sure, chromosomes are binary, and cycles are important, but most of gender performance, even most of the biologically derived performance doesn’t really derive directly from either. The male and female bell curves for most of the sorts of behavioral things we get from gender have way more overlap than difference. To use a racial analog, Yao Ming has the full genetic effects of being Chinese, but is still kinda tall. Many tests performed on Yao will yield results that are not typical of Chinese people and he would struggle not to stand out in many Chinese social contexts even if he were not famous.
That is fascinating stuff. Thank you.
Agreed.
Sure. Or more multidimensional than a spectrum. A particular sex-hormone mix has costs and benefits to the one experiencing it. Some get more costs from leaving their hormones unaltered, some get more benefits – and even what counts as a cost or benefit can vary from person to person.
Some men find themselves happier supplementing their testosterone. Some women can’t stand how oral contraceptives make them feel, other women struggle to function without the right oral contraceptive suppressing the “natural rhythm” they find innately painful, no matter how virginal they are.
I agree there’s more overlap than difference. If, however, your natural level of sex hormones leaves it difficult for you to function, I can understand experiencing antipathy toward being the sex that gifted you with that particular natural level. That is, people sometimes do get a lot of disutility from the way they were born, sex-hormone-wise.
Conservatives don’t generally have a problem with men choosing testosterone-boosting treatment, since that supplementation is congruent with the “nature” of being born with male genitalia. But other sex-hormone altering treatments, even birth-control pills whose overall effect is feminizing, are suspect. In the case of feminizing birth-control hormones, they’re “unfeminizing” in the sense that they suppress fertility until they’re discontinued.
Agreed.
Indeed.
I like to think that Milo’s famous article is still outwith the mainstream, but yes. I suspect a lot of that (the SoCon version, not the Milo version) is bleed from other natural law issues, though.
Late to the game on this (clearing an old backlog of alerts), but I must say this has been a fascinating discussion.
The talk of learned roles especially. There has been a running meme series for the last years with jokes about “adulting” (or failure to do so), but these also apply to figuring out what in heck to make of yourself and your own sex. To that end I wanted to add a point that I’m not sure was fully explored earlier – how you learn to comport yourself depends greatly on who models that behavior for you, or who models that behavior in such a way that you cannot mimic it. We need not necessarily point to obvious childhood abuse for this, as very often (and this has been my own experience) we do not particularly wish to follow parental role models based on the failures we observe even as kids, and if you have a parent who is castigating you for not necessarily acting like them, and they consider themselves the model of how their sex should be and behave, then you have an unattainable goal by which you are held both by them and by yourself. This is enough to sow a great deal of self doubt as to your own identity in the absence of other models or encouragement, and this can easily lead to confusion about being “born right”. The cause of this need not ever rise to the level of abuse or bullying, sometimes you are so innately different from your parents and / or siblings that you just never quite fit the mold.